Former architecture critic for the New Yorker and the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, author of a dozen books (Why Architecture Matters; Up from Zero), and four-decade friend and confidant of Frank Gehry, Paul Goldberger is the perfect biographer for the famous Los Angeles architect. A Gehry building, like the iconic Bilbao Guggenheim, is distinctive for its dramatic undulating curves, angles and reflective metal and glass, but the well-illustrated Building Art exemplifies unobtrusive biography at its best. Without flash or controversy, Goldberger chronicles the life of the octogenarian Gehry from his childhood in Toronto as Frank Goldberg, through the move to his lifelong home in Santa Monica, Calif., to his most recent client-architect relationship with wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg as they create the startling new Facebook corporate campus.
Gehry struggled early with anti-Semitism, a difficult father and a demanding first wife (for whom he changed his name), but Goldberger focuses more on Gehry's professional life than his personal trials. Architect, artist, builder--Gehry emerges as a driven, visionary man who nonetheless has an easy-going, self-effacing demeanor ("more Woody Allen than Frank Lloyd Wright") that has helped him win commissions all over the world. While the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, catapulted him into the limelight ("as if a novel by David Foster Wallace were to outsell those of John Grisham"), he remains a product of sprawling Los Angeles--a "celebrator of the messy, the incomplete, the cheap, and the raw"--who reflects that "architecture had a responsibility to keep you out of the rain, but it served little purpose if that was all it did." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.